Since we’re going to be moving in less than a month, we had better start looking for a place to live. We had already planned on spending the X-mas holidays with Judy’s family in Northern California, so it made sense to prolong our stay there to do a bit of house hunting.

TiVo is in Alviso and Judy’s office will be in San Francisco. We thus needed to find a place that was roughly at the midway point between the two cities. Since Judy will likely be able to work from home at least one day a week, we would preferably find a place that was a bit closer to TiVo than to Quintiles. Based on our work locations, we felt that we could live as far south as Palo Alto and as far north as San Mateo. That narrowed things down a bit, but still included Menlo Park, Atherton, Redwood City, Redwood Shores, San Carlos, Belmont, Woodside, and a bunch of others. We still had a lot of areas to consider!

Craigslist provided us with a good idea of what types of places we could get in our price range, but the search was still pretty overwhelming since we really don’t know the area at all. Which neighborhoods are good? Which are bad? How is traffic - which direction and what times? Where are the places where we would be frequenting (24 Hour Fitness, climbing gym, Whole Foods, etc.)? It can be quite overwhelming moving to an unfamiliar new city. Fortunately, we were able to hook up with Claudette Wood, a real estate agent with Alain Pinel who also helps people find rentals (she gets a cut of your rent from the landlord). She drove us around to a bunch of places and tried to give us a general idea of the various cities in the area.

In looking at the houses, we thought it would be a good idea to take pictures of each place to help remember. That turned out to be a good idea because all the places start to blend in with each other after you’ve seen a few of them. We saw some nasty places and some that were nice. Whereas most people based a lot of their living location on their kids (good schools, places for the kids to play, etc.), we were driven in many ways by Latte. The place had to allow dogs (we came across many that didn’t), and more importantly, it had to have a small yard so we wouldn’t have to walk Latte everytime she needed to do her thing.

Claudette was very nice and helpful, and we really wanted to rent a place through her. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out and we ended up deciding on a place that we found through Craigslist. It is a single family house in Belmont, and pretty close to exactly halfway between TiVo and the Quintiles office in San Francisco. The house is pretty big, around 1300 square feet or so (OK, big relatively speaking compared with our place in San Diego which was only around 950 square feet), and looks to be perfect for Latte. It’s got a good sized backyard and a built-in dog door. One big plus is that it is really close to the 101 which means very little surface street traffic to get to the freeway. With the 2-car garage, this place is probably bigger than we need, but everything else about it met our requirements and the price was reasonable.

We needed to head back to San Diego, so we’ve made a verbal agreement with the landlord and will finalize the lease agreement from San Diego. The move-in date is January 15. We like the place now, but hopefully we’ll still like it after living there for a while!

Posted by Roger at 7:54 pm.